A place for some seriously wild ruminations

Who’s Scamming Who?

If you watched this evening’s debate, you can make up your own mind who won. I just want to point out a couple of things.

Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio scammed spectators tonight. If you recorded the debate as I did, rewatch and look for what I am highlighting.

Both attacked Trump with accusations we’ve heard before and which have gone unsubstantiated. The class action lawsuit against Trump University was raised several times. As Trump pointed out, the case has not been adjudicated; therefore, the question of whether anyone was scammed or not remains unsettled. As lawyers, both Cruz and Rubio know that. All they can do is give the impression of impropriety by the mere repetition of the allegation.

As professing Christians, Cruz and Rubio’s use of calumny to defame Trump violates their core beliefs, if not their politics.

This is especially true of Cruz and Rubio’s joint attack on the Mar-a-Lago hiring practices. According to press reports, Trump’s seasonal hires at that ritzy West Palm Beach resort were of legal immigrants. Rubio, a lawyer, offered no source evidence for his claim that Trump bypassed hiring any Americans to hire legal foreigners. How would he know who Mar-a-Lago had interviewed and ultimately hired anyway?

Cruz’s sin was more profound. Cruz has supported the H-1B visas (as has Rubio) that, most recently, empowered Disney to terminate Americans from their high tech jobs there while withholding their pay until they trained their less qualified but cheaper foreign replacements. Cruz hid that vital information from the audience and the television spectators. Trump’s legal hires came in on a different, seasonal visa.

Perhaps the biggest scam of all, and Trump helped it by his lack of formal rhetorical skill, was Cruz and Rubio’s repetitive demand that Trump answer questions and give more details of his policy proposals. Rewatch several of those instances. They often attacked Trump with that nonsense when they were asked completely different questions, slickly dodging them and failing to detail their own policies.

The moderators failed to follow up on those situations and allowed both men to escape.

Further, neither Cruz nor Rubio offered much more in the way of details. Again, rewatch the different situations that arose. Both first-term senators spoke in generalities or opened with a bloated monologue that did not address the question before enumerating one or two points quickly.

Worse, both men, as they have repeatedly in previous debates, told spectators to go to their websites to learn their policy details, which proves two things: 1. debates probably aren’t the best forum for detailed policy discussions, especially with such a broad array of topics to discuss; 2. Cruz and Rubio don’t provide detailed answers to policy questions either.

I’m not sure spectators want too much detail. They can’t or don’t want to digest it. So the whole fuss about policy details amounts to nothing but a rhetorical ploy.